Here are a few links to start off 2025 (see if you can spot a pattern):

• Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 (ᔥDaring Fireball)
• The new Turing test for AI video… is absolutely horrifying (ᔥMR)
• The Ghosts in the Machine
• On skilled immigration

Happy New Year, dear reader!

I did not read as much as I hoped I would and the list I had set out for myself was wildly optimistic. And that’s fine. Books that were on my actual reading list for the year are marked with an asterisk. There aren’t many of them. Some of the entries have a sentence or two with my current feelings about the book, and the titles link to the fresh-off-the-reading thoughts.

1. Talent by Tyler Cowen was more useful than I thought it would be, though it mostly caters to the tech bro crowd.
2. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis was a re-read, and I shall re-read it again.
3. I and Thou by Martin Buber: incomprehensible.
4. Too Like the Lightning* by Ada Palmer
5. Liberation Day* by George Saunders
6. Slow Productivity by Cal Newport can be summarized thusly: do fewer things, at a natural pace, obsessing over quality. You may now skip reading the book.
7. On Great Writing (On the Sublime) by Longinus was marvelous if for nothing else than as a reminder that things we now find commonplace used to be revolutionary — that is indeed why they are now ubiquitous — and I count the word “commonplace” among those things as well.
8. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt managed to change the world, as more and more American schools are banning phones as they should have done in the first place.
9. Writing to Learn by William Zinsser was a bit of a waste of time.
10. Toxic Exposure* by Chadi Nabhan
11. Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer
12. The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer, and with three of her books in 2024 this is the most I have read in a single year from any one writer. That is as strong of an endorsement as any.
13. Moonbound by Robin Sloan was too thin for my taste. If the foundation of your epic is pop culture you are building a castle on top of sand, so if it is to stay upright it can never be anything more than a sandcastle.
14. False Dawn* by John Gray ensured Gray would feature prominently in my 2025 reading list, now as to whether I will actually ready any more of his work is anyone’s guess.
15. The Friction Project by Robert I. Sutton, which was the only true clunker of the year. I fell for a good showing on a not very good podcast, so this should teach me.
16. Useful Not True by Derek Sivers is out now and you should get it.
17. A System for Writing by Bob Doto was like an expedition to a land in which people use notes to collect their thoughts rather than posting them on a blog like they should.
18. Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis was surprisingly poignant and Lewis too will be on the 2025 list.
19. Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman will turn out to be my book of the year, not because it change much of anything in how I operate but because it is the first book recommendation in my 12 years of marriage that my wife actually took and liked.
20. Order without Design* by Alain Bertaud

I try to wrap up any reading by December 31 so as not to have any book straddling the years but I am now in the middle of The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen and — spoiler alert for the first book I’ll finish in 2025 — it is right up my alley so it gets an honorable mention here. This is in fact where I learned about the origin of “commonplace” that I slipped in at number 7.

And here are the previous two years: 2023 — 2022. Brief book reviews go back to 2017 (here is the very first one); one day I may collect those into lists as well.

An article from Matt Maldre about skipping to the popular parts of a YouTube video caught my eye:

Take this two-hour animation of a candy corn ablaze in a fireplace. This cute video is a simple loop that goes over and over. Certainly, in two hours, there’s got to be sort of Easter egg that happens, right? Maybe Santa comes down the chimney.

Roll over the Engagement Graph, and you’ll see some spikes.

I checked out the spikes. Nothing different happens. It’s the same loop. It’s just people clicking the same spikes that other people did because other people clicked it.

Because humans are humans and nature is nature. Now how many fields of science are made of people analyzing, explaining, narrating and writing millions upon millions of words about an equivalent of these spikes? Microbiome for sure. Much of genetics as currently practiced. Anything that relies on principle component analysis. What else?

The last crusty bread of the year. I’ve only started last year so there is much to learn. One of the thing is: bread flour is called that for a reason and you’d do well to chose it over “all purpose”.

🍿 The Wild Robot (2024): beautifully made, needlessly violent. Crazed chases and shootout spectacles push out a sweet children’s story. Too bad.

Podcast-wise, I am in my 2016 mood. There were five prospects for 2024. I became a regular listener of exactly zero. The true regulars continue to be ATP, EconTalk, Conversations with Tyler, The Talk Show and Dithering, but even there I skip through more episodes than I complete.

Still, moods shift and if I listen to more of anything next year it may be one or more of these:

• The VPZD Show, which is back, intermittently, with more cursing than ever, but also some interesting viewpoints that differ enough from my own to make things interesting.
• The Marginal Revolution Podcast with Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. Kyla Scanlon would have been a better co-host to either, but this will have to do.
• Plain English with Derek Thompson is very much outside of my preferred format, being over-produced and a bit too highfalutin' with its choice of guests, but some of those guests do seem interesting so it may become one of those skip-more-than-I-listen-to shows.

And here are years past: 2023 — 2022 — 2021 — 2020 — 2019 — 2018 — The one where I took a break from podcasts — The very first one

From the most excellent exhibit Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939 on display at the National Portrait Gallery until February 23, 2025:

Rose O’Neill 1874-1944 Born Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

Rose O’Neill invented the internationally famous “Kewpie” cartoon character. It made her a millionaire and the highest-paid woman artist in the world. In Paris, she revealed a very different artistic side. There, she exhibited visionary artworks inspired by dreams and the unconscious.

O’Neill first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1906 and was immediately elected to its prestigious membership. Fifteen years later, Parisian critics praised her one-woman show. It featured fantastic images influenced by pagan mythology and evolutionary theory.

O’Neill championed women’s economic independence and sexual liberation. She blamed fashion for constraining women, asking “How can they hope to compete with men when they are boxed up tight in the clothes that are worn today?” She once pretended to be pregnant to persuade a French clothier to make a corset-free, loose-fitting gown, like the one worn in this portrait. Her nonchalant pose and defiant gaze express O’Neill’s supreme self-assurance.

Here is the portrait, even more remarkable in person:

And yes this is the same Kewpie that endures as a brand of Japanese mayonnaise on sale at your local Costco.

Tracing phenomena through time is a humbling experience. The same exhibit dedicated a whole section to Josephine Baker — just try to categorize this.

You wouldn’t be able to tell it from my recently published posts, but I am in a list-making mood. I have made an end-of-year list of podcasts since at least 2018 (possibly earlier) and more recently I have been making beginning-of-year lists of books I may read. Here is the one for this year and — spoiler alert — I did not follow the list. Regardless, it has been a useful practice and any book lists this time of year are more than welcome.

But anti-recommendations also work! Unlike straight up recommendations — a person you trust saying that something is good — anti-recommendations can get complex and to me more interesting. A still straightforward form is a trustworthy person saying that something is not worth your time. But how about someone you hold in low regard telling you about their favorite books?

Well, I hold one Eric Topol in low regard. Hints of why are here and here, and the short answer is that he is — much like Neal DeGrass Tyson — the stupid person’s idea of a smart person, and a doctor to boot. If a trend is a few years past its peak you can be certain that Topol is pitching his idea about it to a publisher, using third-order book digests about the idea as his source material.

So I was absolutely delighted when he published a list of his favorite books of 2024: flags don’t get much redder than that. Of course Yuval Harari’s new book was one the list — not a fan of his, either — and though I have never heard of the other books or authors, something dramatic will need to happen for me to change my perception of them as derivative dreck. Ars longa, vita brevis.

What makes this especially valuable is that these are mainstream books. An anti-recommendation is only valuable if it is a book you would at least consider and for better or worse these are the books in consideration. The flip side is also true: the most valuable recommendation is for an Amazon Kindle samizdat. For a fun mental exercise, please imagine what it would take for the likes of Topol to do this. Neither could I.

Here is another mental exercise: what if an unreliable person published a list of their least favorite books? Would those two minuses add up to a plus? Probably not: there are many ways in which a book can be bad and even if there was a weak signal for a book’s quality in that list it wouldn’t be enough to overcome the noise of thousands of books vying for attention.

Finally I should note that the delight of dunking on X made me miss the more important point: that any list of books published in 2024 is also a list of books to avoid in 2025, because there is no stronger signal of transiency of an idea than it getting oversized attention. The Lindy effect is real so unless you have a friend who is in the merciless writing business and needs a friendly reader, save your time and read old books.